I have posted reports on both of Canon’s new TS-E lenses (aka tilt/shift), the 17mm f/4L and the 24mm f/3.5L II, and I have been using them full on since receiving them earlier this year. They’re great optics. It’s clear how much of an improvement they are and how much they stand out the first time you use them.

Now, architectural photographer Rainer Viertlböck has posted two tests comparing them with his medium-format digital back, a 33mp Sinar e75, coupled with Rodenstock’s high-end view camera lenses; the 23HR, 28HR, and 35HR. Rainer used the Canon lenses on a Canon 5D Mark II.

Canon 17mm TS-E F/4L compared to Rodenstock 23HR + Sinar e75

Canon 24mm TS-E f/3.5L II compared to Rodenstock 28HR & 35HR + Sinar e75

Many are in agreement about how great these new Canon lenses are but I don’t know that anyone, myself included, expected them to compare so favorably against a medium-format digital back when used with view camera lenses. In the 17mm TS-E test, the Canon doesn’t have quite the detail or resolution of the medium-format kit but it comes awful close. This holds true even when the Canon files are res’d. up to match the Sinar e75 resolution.

In the 24mm TS-E II test, the Canon does a much better job than the Sinar/Rodenstock combo in controlling flare from tungsten light sources.

Every digital kit is a compromise of sorts. With a DSLR you have flexibility but loose in sharpness; with a medium-format digital back you gain in sharpness and resolution, but are more limited in workflow, operability, and the cost of entry is orders of magnitude higher.

It used to be that one of the main factors in digital architectural photography tipping the scales toward medium-format digital backs was the ability to use view camera lenses. This combo offered a photographer image quality which a DSLR with SLR style lenses could never attain. Well, never is broken and that compromise is looking less like a compromise and more like a choice based on style and needs.

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My Canon 17mm TS-E and 24mm TS-E II posts:

• Quick Look – Canon 17mm f/4L TS-E Lens
• Longer Look – Canon 17mm f/4L TS-E Lens
• Live View is My Friend (features the Canon 17mm TS-E lens)
• Canon’s TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II Lens
• What’s It Take to Fill a Space and Make It Your Own? (features the Canon 17mm TS-E lens)

I see an iPhone enabled site looking at me.

One change with new web site and blog is the ability for both to format themselves on the iPhone and on other touch-type smart phones. This makes for quicker loading and painless viewing of both sites when seen by those on the go.

JonRoemer.com on the iPhone:

Learning to See on the iPhone:

For JonRoemer.com this is a feature built into the web site’s structure. It replaces my hand built, hand maintained, iPhone site which ran concurrent with the old JonRoemer.com.

For the blog, being on a WordPress platform, flexibility is the name of the game. I tried three mobile versions of the blog, each promised a simple design, but only one delivered on design, ease of use, and worked out of the box. The mobile theme I’m using is WPtouch iPhone Theme. It has many options built-in, all accessed via WordPress’ settings menu, it couldn’t be easier. If I had to change one thing with WPtouch iPhone Theme, I’d want the ability to not have the calendar month and day as an icon with each post on the homepage. That’s it. This WordPress Plug-in is incredibly well made and well documented.

The two other iPhone mobile themes I tried were Carrington Mobile and Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin. The former looked to be even simpler in feel than WPtouch but it did not reformat blog photos for smaller phone screens leading to half of each image being cropped out. The latter promised to automatically create a site that mimicked Learning to See but other than orange links it looked nothing like Learning to See and it too had image problems. It dropped many images when viewed on the phone leaving placeholder icons instead.

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Apologies to Eric Carle and Bill Martin Jr. of children’s book fame. If you have kids or grandkids, if you ever babysat kids who are in the board-book stage, you know their work. Hopefully, I won’t have an angry author and illustrator looking at me.

I may be a bit late to the table on this but I thought I’d relate my experience shifting a few services over to Google.

Two months ago, awash in spam, seeing no end in sight, and having had about a year and a half of managing all my email twice (once on my iPhone and once on my desktop) I decided to give Google a shot. Google via Google Apps offers *domain name email services. Regardless of where your web site is hosted, you can run your domain name email through Google for free or for a small fee (the fee gets you better customer service and guaranteed service uptime.)

The advantages in doing this are numerous. First your email is via an IMAP service (as opposed to POP); this means that your email lives out there on Google’s servers. So, whenever you view it, delete it, move it around, or reply to it those changes are seen on every device you use to access it. Any changes you make only have to be done once. If you use multiple computers or a device like an iPhone then there is no more multiple management. Apple offers a similar service with its MobileMe email but they don’t offer it for domain name email.

The second advantage is that Google has some of the best spam filters ever invented. You don’t have to set anything and there is little to manage. They work, plain and simple. Who knows what they do but you got to love it. I get 150-300 spams per day and it is such a relief to no longer have it in my face. Once in a while a solitary spam may make it through the filter or once in a while legitimate email gets tagged as spam, but it’s rare.

Prior to this I had used Apple Mail’s spam detection and had set up many filters but it was never good enough. Spam in foreign languages always got through as did spam with no text but with image files attached and spam masquerading as email I had opted into.

Google Apps

Configuring Apple Mail for Google Apps mail

Google Apps Help

*Domain Name email is email tied into your web site domain name. Email for www.mydomain.com would be email@mydomain.com. Using domain name email for your business is a no brainer. It looks professional and it’s easy for clients to remember. To not use it in this web driven world is to do your business a disservice.

Google Analytics are web stats. To use the service you create a free account and then put a small bit of code on every web page that you want to track. This is easier than it sounds and works well for web sites and blogs. Most web site hosts provide some sort of web stats but I’ve found their offerings to be rudimentary at best. My shift to Google Analytics has highlighted those services weaknesses.

My web site is hosted by Dogbark.com, their stats are included in the hosting via software from Webalizer. According to Webalizer, last month I had over 5000 unique URLs view my site, an average of 422 pages viewed per day, and an average of 83 visits per day. Sounds great but how accurate is it? On a simple ticker count I’m sure it is accurate but it’s also misleading in terms of the activity on my site. It includes everything – robots or spiders visiting my site, a client who may access a file on the site but not view any web pages, and it even includes me double-checking my site or working on my site. How does it compare to what Google Analytics is reporting? For the same time frame, May of 2009, Google Analytics reports that I had 258 unique URL’s visit my site, an average of 187 pages viewed per day, and an average of 10 visits per day. That’s a big difference.

The discrepancy is because Google Analytics knows to filter out robots and spiders cataloging my site, it doesn’t include files downloaded or accessed which are not part of my web pages, and I have filtered it to not include me in the stats. So, what I’ve learned is that my site’s overall popularity is much lower than I had been led to believe. A bit of a bummer but Google Analytics also provides much more information and on that front things are looking wonderful. While my traffic is less than assumed the quality of the visits is extremely high. This is information that Webalizer never made clear. For example, during May the average visitor viewed 20 pages on my site and the bounce rate was under 15%. This means that over 85% of the visitors went beyond my home page.

Google Analytics has many more features and is extremely flexible in what it can report and how it presents the information. One feature is benchmarking where it will compare your site to all sites in its database of a similar size or to all sites in its database within the same field. On these fronts my site is doing very well, too. Compared to all sites my site is doing over 2,000% better on visits, over 18,500% better on pageviews, almost 1000% better on average time on site, and the bounce rate is over 60% lower than the benchmark. All very very good. Similarly, if I benchmark against other photo sites things still look good: over 230% better on visits, over 2000% better on pageviews, about 150% better on average time on site, and the bounce rate is over 50% better than the photo sites benchmark.

In the past week I added Google Analytics reporting to my blog. It’s too early to report stats on that but I’m finding parallels between it and what I’ve learned from adding Google Analytics to my web site.

Google Analytics

What can you learn from all this information? It can be a bit of a black hole if you let yourself get lost in the numbers and the data. It’s not my desire to get sucked in. In the reports, I’m looking for confirmation of my how my site is doing and general trends – that the reports I am working with now are better tailored to the information I need only helps.

I’m now on my third iPhone in one-and-a-half years. Sounds like a lot. It’s not really. iPhone #1 lasted until it got wet (more on this later), Apple replaced it with iPhone #2, and then I upgraded this past June to the iPhone 3g, iPhone #3. A big question all along has been what to put the iPhone in and how to carry it. It’s nice and sleek without a case, but sleek and slippery are pretty close in feel, and a dropped iPhone with no protection is not going to last long. Running around on assignment, well, accidents happen.

Which brings me back to iPhone #1. I’ve seen many iPhone cases and the one that I’ve liked the most and used the most has been the Case-mate Signature Series Leather case. It’s soft leather so it feels great, it looks great and while it adds some bulk it has protected my iPhones from many a fall. The leather is wrapped around a plastic form fitting shell. Very nice and it looks professional. You’re not going to feel like the guy in that American Express ad who tries to pay for a client lunch with his personalized cartoon-hero credit card thereby killing the deal.

Case-mate Signature Case, Photo: Case-mate

So, how to carry the iPhone around? Short of a man purse or happening to be wearing a jacket, I’m not crazy about putting it in my pants pocket.  Is that an iPhone down there or you just happy to see me?.. It needs a holster. Case-mate makes a holster but similar to the iPhone I’ve been through a few of these. It’s a nice concept and allows the iPhone to rest on a belt. It should work. The problem is Case-mate uses a large plastic clip which doesn’t last long. The clip breaks off or the spring in it (a doubled over piece of thin metal) looses its resistance so the clip no longer holds. Their holster also does not keep a firm grip on the phone.

Which brings me back to iPhone #1. I’m on assignment photographing architectural interiors, working in a renovated bathroom space. It’s tight, not too much room, working with 14mm and 20mm lenses. I’ve got to be by the toilet to get the right angle and shoot through the doorway. Getting to the tripod requires a move out of Cirque de Soleil. If you don’t know where this is going I’ll give you a hint, I should have put the lid down on the toilet… I’m doing the move, twisting to get behind the camera, the clip on the iPhone holster doesn’t hold and down it goes, right into the commode. I fish it out, wipe it off, turn it off, wash my hands, later wipe off the phone with some cleaner, turn it back on after a long time and for a week or so it still works. But then the top line of the keyboard stops working. No qwerty for me. Luckily, Apple replaces the phone under warranty, no questions asked.

So, long story short, finding the right holster that will fit my iPhone with the Case-mate sleeve on it and which has a secure clip has been a googling hobby of mine. I just found it. I had to go to the ends of the earth, okay, I didn’t but my browser and my credit card info did. It just arrived and it’s great. The holster case is made by Nutshell of New Zealand. They make leather cases for all sort of phones, pda’s, cameras, gps’, and more.  For the iPhone alone they offer fifteen case sizes each of which can be customized further. The icing on the cake, they offer a case made to take an iPhone with the Case-mate Signature case on it. Too cool for school. I ordered two in black, one with a clip for me, one without a clip for my wife whose iPhone lives in her purse. You can add a full-flap or a security strap, either with velcro or a magnetic clasp. Nutshell has even measured to make sure the magnet they use is shielded.  The belt clip is a clip with a capital “C.” It is steel and it is not going to break. Your belt will break before it does.

The inside of the Nutshell case is very soft, it won’t scratch your phone, it has a great new leather leathery smell, and the Nutshell holster is very comfortable to wear. Much less bulky against your hip than the Case-mate holster.  Two thumbs up. I think this combo, the Case-mate Signature case with the Nutshell holder, is about as perfect as it can get.

Nutshell Holster Case, Photo: Nutshell

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Updated 1/13/09: New Nutshell photo and additional information.

Back in July when I wrote about MyWeather Mobile I said, “In a future update I’d like to see the ‘Trend’ forecast expanded from twelve hours to twenty-four or thirty-six hours – with that change this app would be perfect.”  MyWeather Mobile has done just that in version 1.1 adding thirty-six hour trend data into a full screen window.  They’ve also added detailed current conditions to the mix.

This is a very handy app for planning weather related assignments and for getting current weather information while on location.

Current Conditions detail:

36-Hour Trend:

Selecting a time will give you an icon showing conditions:
sunny, partly cloudy, cloudy, rain, etc.

As is often the case I’ve thought of one more thing that could be added – sunrise and sunset times.  MyWeather Mobile are you listening?…

ShareLink:  Email • Twitter • Facebook

My kids have been completely ensconced within Harry Potter for some time now.  They read and re-read each book multiple times.  I have not read the books, much to their dismay, but I have enjoyed watching the movies with them.  As a photographer, one detail in the movies (and I assume the books as well) can’t escape your eye.  Whenever a print image is shown (newspaper, flyer, framed print or poster on a wall) the image within it moves.  It’s not meant to be full video.  The motion is jerky and just like a radar loop on a weather map it constantly repeats itself.  In photos loved ones can wave, in the paper it can give a bit more information than a still image.  It’s a very striking effect and one that would seem to be confined to the author’s imagination. Well…

This fall Esquire magazine will be producing electronic covers using technology from E-Ink.  The covers will be black and white, just like Harry Potter.  The basic elements of the page are the same as traditional print with the addition of a thin film, I assume a chip of some sort and an extremely thin battery.

Recently, in the photo world there has been talk of convergence.  The convergence of cameras already here or soon to come, ones that will shoot high quality video and still imagery simultaneously.  The inferred belief that in the future commercial still photographers will have to learn video.  If this Esquire cover technology takes off, goes beyond being a novelty, what will that mean? Are we slated to have a moving image for all commercial work whether we like it or not?  Somehow that’s doubtful.  A magazine filled with only movable images will probably come off as too busy and too noisy (not sound noise but visual overload noise.)  But then again, if the norm is a movable image, will the client insist on both? “Just in case.” There’s also the green factor.  Is print embedded with moving images created via additional materials moving in the right direction?

As photographers do we want to go through another transition?  Can’t we rest, at least for a bit, having made the transition to digital?  In the end, we’ll probably have no choice in the matter.  The market and tools will determine how things progress.  No matter what happens though, having two infant technologies point in the same direction at the same time is interesting indeed…

NPR story on E-Ink and Esquire’s upcoming covers

I managed to get an iPhone 3G yesterday, upgrading from the original iPhone. What’s the best way to get one without waiting online for hours?  Just call your local Apple Store and see if they’ve gotten in fresh stock that day.  Apple has a web page that will tell you which stores have stock for the next day (you have to access the page after 9pm) but it only gives a snapshot of the inventory that night.  So, calling the store during the day is the most direct way to go.  When I called the Apple Store in Bridgewater, NJ they had just received their delivery, all of the models, and they had no one waiting in line.  I got there an hour or so later and a short line had formed (about seven people) but my wait was only 25 minutes.

How is the phone?

The phone is great.  No, it’s not a huge difference from the first model but there are some new features plus subtle differences that are worth it in my book.

3G

3G is nice and significantly faster.  DSL Reports has a test page setup for the iPhone.  Over 3G I get 758 kbps and over the Edge network I get 100 kbps. The difference is obvious when surfing using the iPhone’s web browser.  The 3G network is now fast enough to hear streaming music.  I’m a big fan of the Internet station Radio Paradise.  They have updated their web site so that you can access the music stream when you visit the site from your iPhone.  Very cool.

GPS

GPS is in the new iPhone and for the moment it is a bit of a novelty.  You can see yourself moving along a Google Map.  I look forward to some full fledged GPS navigation programs coming out and to using the GPS function within other third-party apps (like MyWeather Mobile and GoSkyWatch).

Shape

The new iPhone has a curved back and more tapered edges.  Again, not a huge change but it’s well designed and feels comfortable.

Screen

The screen on the iPhone 3G is noticeably better.  It’s slightly warmer and slightly sharper.  Photos are reproduced more accurately and the color gamut is improved.  The old screen showed some posterization and the new screen has none visible.  I’ve read that it’s actually the same screen as the original iPhone. If that’s the case then Apple created a much better display profile for the new phone.

In the Car

This is the first issue I’ve found with iPhone 3G and apparently it’s very common. I have a third-party interface from USA SPEC that allows me to play the phone through my car’s stereo system.  It makes the car think the phone or an iPod is a CD Changer.  It’s always worked well, the music sounds great and it charges the phone or iPod at the same time.

With the iPhone 3G the music still plays but the phone no longer charges.  The culprit is the iPhone/iPod connector used by many of these manufacturers.  The connector has 30 pins inside, each pin has a job to do.  Some pins are reserved for power over firewire, some for power over USB.  The iPhone 3G can only get power over USB where the first generation iPhone could get power over either. So, if the connector is only providing power via the firewire pins then the new phone will not charge.  The good news is that USA SPEC has told me they are working on a new cable (should be about 6 weeks) and one of the editors at MacWorld posted on a forum that he expects to see adapters as well which will shift the power from the firewire pins to the USB pins.  There is no word on when those adapters will come or from whom.

In the past few years delivering image files has shifted from CD’s to one of three options:  DVD’s, External Hard Drives or Internet Transfer.  Which of the three is most appropriate depends upon file sizes, overall job size, speed and convenience.  External Hard Drives are most appropriate for large jobs as Internet Transfer is when speed is the mitigating factor.  In the middle is delivery of the assignment on disc and a confluence of factors has brought DVD delivery to the forefront – DVD drives have become ubiquitous, the price of DVD discs have fallen, camera file sizes have grown bigger and the speed of DVD burning has increased.